Beware of ‘Population Health Management’

I recently was made aware of a new phrase in the healthcare industry: population health management. This sounds benign enough but it should be very scary, particularly for anyone watching this that has any underlying medical problems. Let me tell you why.

If you don’t feel like cattle when you hear the phrase population health management, you certainly will when you are victimized by it. Population health management ultimately is central planning in healthcare that doesn’t take the needs of individual into account, but rather the needs of populations. It also (and this is the really scary part) indicates that the hospitals, some of the most abusive cronies in the industry, will become the insurance company.

Let me explain what that means. That means people will pay insurance premiums to hospitals, who will then take risks in delivering healthcare. What they will say is that if the outcomes are great, then everybody makes more money and it’s wonderful. What it really means is that those who really need healthcare, who are the sickest and those more likely to have complicated and poor outcomes due to health status, will never receive the care at all. It will be far too risky to enter into a caring relationship with a patient like that, particularly when the hospital is the insurer and stands to lose money.

Population health management is a phrase that I would encourage you to keep on your radar and to watch for. This means rationing, pure and simple. Population health management is the same as the care-denying, money-making strategies that HMOs employ and have employed for years and that’s the reason they are so unpopular.

Keep an eye out for population health management and understand that those who are involved in these programs make more money to the extent that care is denied to those who actually are participating in these schemes.